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Crowdsourcing: A Definition

I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Read the original article about crowdsourcing, published in the June, 2006 issue of Wired Magazine.

December 22, 2006

It seems that one of Gannett's larger newspapers, the Indianapolis Daily Star, has hit a snag on its way to implementing the company's "Information Center" newsroom, aka the Seven Desk Initiative (which I wrote about on Wired.com as well as in a series of blog posts). Part of the Star's plans for reinventing its operations included asking its editorial staff to write advertorials. In a memo to management obtained by Editor & Publisher, the union representing the paper's writers and editors strenuously objected to the violation of ethics guidelines that require the union to uphold a "high wall of separation between
editorial and advertising." Management then modified its request to include only copyeditors and designer, but those "non-bylined" positions are also covered by the guild's guidelines.

Issues of "church and state," as they're commonly referred to in journalism, aren't central to crowdsourcing per se, but the situation at the Daily Star raises issues with which any newsroom putting the crowd to work will have to deal. There's a common misperception that the wacky
ways of the Web have blurred all the old boundaries. This is true, as far as it goes. But new boundaries have been
established, and some look remarkably similar to the old ones. Online
communities may not give a whit whether reporters write advertorials,
but they will damn well expect to be informed of the fact. When open
source methodologies migrated to fields outside programming, certain cultural assumptions that helped define the open source movement came along for the ride. Transparency, in all its forms, is taken for granted. If Gannett wants to play in the new sandbox, it's going to have to learn the new rules. This shouldn't be too hard since, to restate, they look a lot like the old ones. To quote an excellent post on Ken Doctor's digital media site Content Bridges, "Cardinal rule number one for the digital content age: Build trust."

December 19, 2006

Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year is the newly empowered, review-writing, blog-posting, photo-taking, video-making prosumer. If the choice seems like a no-brainer to those of us steeped in the heady rhetoric of Web 2.0, let's remember that this is a risk-averse journalistic institution. (In 2001 Time named Rudy Giulilani Man of the Year, bypassing the obvious--if incendiary--choice: Osama bin Laden.) Viewed in this light, Al Gore or Nancy Pelosi would have made for a much safer choice. Time made a gutsy move and should be commended for it.

This hasn't been the general consensus among the blogging punditry. Some reactions were funny. Others were merely annoying. (When did Gawker go from vapid-but-funny to merely vapid?) And some, I thought, were right on target. But all this is besides the point, namely, my own self-aggrandizement. I contributed a spread to the package, an idea-map of sorts to the companies and concepts that make up Web 2.0. (You can read the text here, but the graphic somehow didn't make it online so it won't make much sense.)

I thought I'd lost the giddy elation of seeing my name in print back in college. But I may not be so wizened after all. Working on the package was a ball. Time produces three separate magazines for the POTY issue, only to choose one of them on the very eve of publication. So on Saturday night I sat down to watch a CNN special on the selection process with no more idea than any other viewer of who Time would pick. My chips were on Ahmadinejad. Then at the end of the hour Time managing editor Richard Stengel revealed his choice: Me! Tomorrow I'll go back to being perpetually unimpressed. Today I give way to giddy elation.

December 03, 2006

Just wanted to throw out a quick (and belated) link to a post in the politics and technology site, Personal Democracy Forum, about an innovative fundraising strategy launched by the Democratic fundraising clearinghouse, ActBlue. Essentially, ActBlue is allowing the public to "draft" potential presidential candidates by contributing to campaigns that may or may not actualize. If the given political figure chooses not to run, the money will go instead to the DNC. Joshua Levy, the PDF writer behind the post, calls this crowdsourcing. I don't quite agree (it doesn't replace a function previously performed by employees), but I will call it crowdfunding, and I think that like anything that provides a greater voice to the electorate, it's a sign of progress in our political system. Levy says he's spoken to Republicans who have assured him the GOP has a similar effort in the works.